I recently made a personal data art piece based on Haruki Murakami’s latest book the city and its uncertain walls. I’m not always sure how ideas like this pop in to my head, but this article is an attempt to describe where the idea came from, how I worked on it, and where I may take it.


The making of a shoji poster

Let me start with the data art piece:

data art print based on haruki murakami's the city and its uncertain walls

This print visualises the rhythm of the book. Each square represents a chapter and the longer the chapter is, the wider the white area is. The resulting image resembles a collection of Japanese sliding doors, or shoji. That’s why I nicknamed this design the shoji print.

Now I did not set out to make this design, so let me take you back to where it all began: the first Haruki Murakami book I read.


Chip Kidd

I can’t talk about Murakami without talking about Chip Kidd. Chip Kidd designs book sleeves. Years ago, I saw his TED talk about some of his work and the process behind it. (If you are interested, you can view it here. ) During this talk, he shares how a good book cover offers a preview of the entire story that’s inside.

The book sleeve that stood out to me back then was Jurassic Park. Before his talk, I didn’t know that it was a book and that he (sort of) designed the park’s logo! I was slowly picking up reading back then and added this book to my list.

A few years after that, I watched the video again, and was intrigued by another book cover: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. The design gives a preview of a world within a world and made me curious.

Another 1Q84 recommendation

As I started reading more, I started looking for interesting books everywhere. Some of the best books I’ve read are books that end up on my radar twice. When I was aimlessly scrolling through YouTube, I got a recommendation for a video: Adam Savage’s favourite science fiction books. I watched it and 1Q84 was on the list.

That was recommendation number two and so I was pushed to read my first Haruki Murakami story.


Why I like Haruki Murakami

I was a bit anxious to start reading 1Q84, as the Dutch version is made up of a little under 1300 pages. I could only hope I enjoyed reading it. And boy did I!

The story sucked me in, although I could not clearly identify why. For me, this is not a bad feeling to have. I had a good time and in a time where more and more of our lives are quantifiable, it’s good to enjoy something without a very clearly identifiable reason.

New content to read!

Discovering a new writer adds a whole new library of books to my reading list. But it is also dangerous, as I could easily decide to rush through all the books, devouring all of Murakami’s work.

I decided not to do that. It felt (and still feels) like a slow approach to reading his work is a good fit for the work. He is now one of my favourite writers and I read his work every now and them. I currently haven’t exceeded two books a year. I’m taking my time to go through it.

What books you have and haven’t read before starting in a new one, has some impact on the reading experience. So here’s the list of the books I read (in order of reading) before I started reading the city and its uncertain walls. It frames my personal Murakami context at that point in time:

  • 1Q84
  • What I talk about when I talk about running
  • Kafka on the shore
  • After the quake
  • The wind-up bird chronicle

If you are a Murakami reader, you know that the second book is non-fiction. In it, he shares why he runs and some notes on his writing process. The reason why he runs has some overlap with my own (he even inspired me to run a 100k total distance in a week).

For some reason, I thought:

I like how this person is thinking, I need to read more of his work.

I was this book pushed me to read more of it.


Visualising the city and its uncertain walls

His latest book is titled the city and its uncertain walls. The Dutch version was released in the first half of 2024 and just before summer, I got it as a gift from my wife. I took it with me as my to-read for the upcoming holiday.

Once again, I had a lovely time with this story.

It wasn’t long before I got the idea to make a data visualization of the book and I made the first step in this project during that same holiday: I decided that I would use a simple dataset, one that anyone who reads books can understand.

I set out to visualise the length of the chapters.


Visuals that did not make it

I wrote down the number of pages down in my notebook during my holiday. When I got home, I digitised the data and started sketching using code. I always start with a basic visualisation, to check if the data looks okay. I opted for a bar chart and made this plot:

Perfect. Next up, I made a version that simplified the layout by removing some of the standard chart elements (e.g. axis) and grouped the chapters by the book’s section (it has three):

More simple indeed, but not a result I liked.

The second version of the visual was a sort of sun burst chart, where each sun ray intensifies if the chapter has more pages:

It’s was getting more interesting, but it was not clicking.


Inspiration from the web

Nowadays, I like browsing Pinterest for inspiration. I sometimes look for specific types of data visualisations, but I also try to take a more creative approach. When I see an interesting graphical image, I ask my self:

How would this image work if this was a data visualisation?

Reviewing some of my saved pins, and with the Murakami project lingering in my head, this is the one that pulled my attention:

Link to pin.

Not a data visualisation per say, but a simple, yet interesting pattern. And it inspired me to use a shape with a variable width to visualise chapter length.

The visual that did make it

After some test, I ended up with some I liked. Let’s have a look at the visual:

data visualisation test based on haruki murakami's the city and its uncertain walls

Initially, the squares gave me the feeling of windows opening up and closing down. I think it is a great fit for a book, as each chapter gives a certain amount of insights into a story. Longer chapters often tell you more, give you a better view through the window.

I decided to get this visual out of my computer, print it, and put it next to the book:

data visualisation test print based on haruki murakami's the city and its uncertain walls

The shoji poster

Good ideas never stop lingering in my head. With the print in the frame, I slowly started thinking about ways to make a more interesting one.

I was aiming for a wall print, so the visual needed to be bigger than the existing one (A4). Besides that, I thought it would benefit from some colour. After exploring and testing with the colours in the book Dictionary Of Color Combinations (vol. 2) by Haishoku Soukan, I decided to go with greyish lavender.

With some extra modifications, the print ended up like this:

data art sample image based on haruki murakami's the city and its uncertain walls

I had it printed in a A2 format:

Pretty cool right?

Normally, I’m happy with a result like this and leave it as it is. But this time, I took the poster with me in to the city (a city without uncertain walls) to get some feedback. I visited two local book stores, a place for local product designers, and my favourite coffee place.

This yielded some interesting results. First of all: I was invited to put my work up on the wall in the coffee place!

Besides that, talking about the project and listening to reactions gave me a name for the visualisation. Initially, I thought the image resembled a collection of windows, but one of the book store attendants said the squares also look like Japanese sliding doors, or Shoji. An idea I did not think of myself!

With a project about a Japanese writer and a print with Japanese colours, it would be the perfect name for the visual: a shoji plot.


What’s next for my Haruki Murakami data project

The idea is still lingering somewhere in my head and I have a few ideas on where to take it. I might make the shoji plot of more of Haruki Murakami’s work. Maybe I’ll look for other visual ways to explore his stories.

But for now, I’m happy with what I have and will leave it out there to linger for a while.

Let’s see where it takes me.


Interested in the shoji print? I print the poster on request for Murakami fans. Read more here.